Yes, you have proven, to a certain point,
that I can kill in London with complete
impunity. Those bumblers, Scotland Yard,
lack skills sufficient to investigate
the draining (with some mutilation) of
a corpse. But yet, the choice of victims is
not thoroughly addressed in your research.
You did not seek aristocrats, bankers,
merchants, scholars or tutors in your spree:
only these whores---these poor pathetic whores---
on whom plagues and despairs have multiplied,
with hardly one full set of teeth among
them. These you offer cheerfully,
the worst of London's disenfranchised crowds;
whose births have not been celebrated, nor
their deaths regretted. Blood is blood is blood:
but I can sip it from the beautiful
throat of a squirming adolescent whose
virginal privates thrill to my entrance;
or I can, gagging, take it from some slut
whose throat is full of opened, leaking sores.
And, even worse for you as well as me,
you could not keep your flip braggadocio
private, although I asked for utmost stealth.
(Young Mr. Harker was much more discrete
when he brokered my purchase of Carfax).
You sent triumphant letters---to the Yard,
to newspapers, and individuals.
The ear, the piece of kidney---neither of
those was required by that task for which I
recruited you. Yes, this will cost your life.
You will know how those harlots might have felt---
and how my multitudes of victims felt---
when life, no matter how much it suffers,
is taken. No, you will not rise, undead.
Even the least of those who follow me
in that existence have more wisdom in
their fingertips or fangpoints than you have
shown in these last three months. I will be quick:
your neck will snap like some dried chicken bone.
Your body, with a flash, will fall into
this murky Thames: its thick fog will conceal
this moment that you and I, only. share.
If your soggy remains are found at all,
the nameless record of you will declare
you one of those unfortunates who seek
peace, and release, within the river's depth . . .
unless it spews you up like Jonah's whale
spewed him and, on its shore, small vermin will
devour---in bestial haste---the most of you.